Recently, I’ve been struck down with a new infatuation. After years of consuming and producing for the web, I’ve become more and more interested in the remix culture that has begun to take over in recent years. This all started through attending conferences and hack days with the folks at Ubelly, where attendees would use open data and ninja coding skills to hack together projects in a short space of time. Commercial imperative, feasibility and all the other usual constraints with development are thrown out the window, leaving room for creativity, fun and play. This is when projects like Instacat (Instagram+Cat hack), Kinectar (Kinect djing hack) and QuickR (data transfer via QR code) come together…
This week I’ve been tinkering with the Twitter API and TFL data to let us know how full our closest boris bike dock is. An obscenely small amount of code and a Twitter account later, I’ve cobbled together @33Bikes, which tweets back the status of Farringdon Lane’s dock when anyone tweets #33bikes.
Simple, but effective.
Think back to the 80s, when DJs started to pull together different music tracks to create completely new songs, kicking off remix culture. These days, the same is being done with the web. While #33Bikes isn’t going to change the world, it’s an example of remix culture, taking existing services out there, pulling them apart, mashing them and making them relevant to you.
Where to next? For me it’s analytics APIs, physical foursquare hacks and some kinect-based tomfoolery. What are you going to hack together yourself?
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